Enlightenment
Policing and crime related research mainly comes originally from (academic discipline-wise) sociological roots. Yet things have shifted over the years, so here we explore a little of that timeline to see what was and where we may be heading next.
Crime has always been with us, but if we started our review from the Enlightenment period (late 17th century) we find a ‘classical’ form of criminological thinking (although such titles were yet to be adopted) whereby society was regarded as a contract, so when crime breached that contract State control was required. The focus then was on the criminal act and since the act was one of free will, punishment should follow.
A technical problem
By the late nineteenth century, new social sciences were developing, exploring the causes of crime. There was a growing trend of positivism where social sciences borrowed some of its approaches from the natural sciences. Crime now was seen as a technical problem, requiring repair; with a focus upon the criminal.
French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was preoccupied with understanding the science of moral order, contextualised by the relationship between the individual and society. Durkheim, originally at the University of Bordeaux, then later at the Sorbonne (University of Paris), believed social causes of crime were not just about material contexts but also cultural and situational. This led to Durkheim contributing theories to explain why some people felt more positively engaged (or not) in society, popularised as anomie and social integration concepts.
Social causation
By the 1950s, new positivist thinking was emerging, with strain and sub cultural theorising starting to emerge. The notion of social causation was popular in exploring how cultural and economic contexts contributed to behaviors (such as crime). The scientific approach was changing in order to identify reliable data to study society, searching for relationships between cause and effect. Numerous variations emerged, from the ecological interests of the Chicago School, attachment theory and interactionism.
Towards the 1970s, there was an interest in the social constructionism of deviance; radical criminology for example was influenced by class division and inequality. Sociologists tended more towards interpreting how meanings were constructed in everyday life, by examining cultural discourse.
Born bad?
Constructive approaches rejected the stark labels of ‘being born bad’ and sought to understand how deviant behaviour might be linked to societal influences as an underlying cause. The focus now again was on the criminal act, and tools of enquiry included phenomenology, ethnomethodology, Foucouldian approaches and post modernism.
By the late 1970s, synoptic links were being explore between crime, education and health, with a new focus on victims. In 1979, funding for research changed when Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet placed a new focus on pragmatic application; this is why research changed at that point in history, since commissioning tends to set both the focus and depth for career researchers.
Managing crime
This paradigm shift, overall, nudged research enquiry to move away from causes towards control: pushing back theoretical speculation about where crime might come from towards a more pragmatic attention to control and management. Into the 1980s, a more pragmatic social control agenda accepted crime and its rise and was focused on tactics for the ‘here and now’.
The new realism was an acceptance that crime was a part of life and needed to be managed. New control theories tended now to focus upon situational crime prevention, informed by evaluative research methods, in order to manage offenders. Left realists argued that crime was linked to wider contexts, such as deprivation; whilst right realists judged the criminal act as a choice – often opportunistic – hence the focus should be on deterrence.
A pragmatic approach
The paradigm shift here might be summarised as one of pragmatism, since there was a sense that sociologists and criminologists had looked for the causes if crime for a century and not really got anywhere. The pragmatism now argued things like generational deprivation could not be resolved overnight, but protectional and control tactics could be deployed immediately.
As a consequence of situational crime prevention, more research was commissioned on the potential of surveillance (which spurred the growth of CCTV), although there were mixed studies about displacement and long term crime trending. As policing and crime related research became less theoretical and more policy oriented, ‘administrative’ criminology grew, where the dominant strategy is evaluative research.
Problem Oriented
Problem Oriented Policing also took a pragmatic situational stance, to identify ‘hot spots’ and target resource dosage, assessed by tracking and testing for ‘what works’. Yet, just as fifty years ago, many researchers started to abandon theorising about causes (which many regarded after 100 years of effort had failed to deliver results) are we now on the verge of a further paradigm shift?
If the ‘what works’ approach had indeed worked over fifty years, why is there a rise on many instances of acquisitive and violent crime? Does ‘what worked’ work? The pragmatism from the 1980s was to ‘get real’ – to acknowledge reality – yet has that pragmatism now failed its own test? ‘Controlling’ crime, by reacting to it, is not only unaffordable but has resulted in the lowest ever confidence in policing, rising crime and organised crime profit that exceeds GDP levels.
Solution oriented
Living with the problem is one ‘pragmatic’ approach’ but Coxhead, Pancholi and Uduwerage-Perera (2025) have published new exploratory research with Springer (New York) arguing now is the time for a new – less passive and more ambitious – solution oriented direction. The argument goes that by focusing on where we want to get to, rather than reacting to things we don’t like, we could revolutionise sustainable policy investment into safer streets.
For the future, the likelihood is we need to get more proactive and upstream as reactive problem solving – whilst once regarded as ‘pragmatic’, is unaffordable (because of it s repeat demand failure) and has – after five decades – failed to change the status quo of crime. The message for exploring the future needs to be more assertively ambitious – less what worked and more what if. Frustrations with repeating a failing cycle is what induced the genesis of pragmatic research in the 1980s: now it is time to change again we can’t afford not to.
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